My host (Dreamhost) either doesn’t allow me to store drafts/sent mail on the mail server, or I simply can’t find the setting to allow this in their control panel. No worries, I can store drafts locally.

If you see this in Mail.app when composing email, and you use IMAP-style email, here’s the fix.

Preferences -> Accounts -> Mailbox Behaviors -> (uncheck) Store draft messages on the server.

As you can see in the image above this can work for sent mail too.

Obviously this will not store drafts or sent mail on the server. Think carefully about this — if you retrieve email from different Macs/PCs often this may not be the solution for you. This solution works fine for me because I always use the same Mac for email, so if I write a draft it will be stored locally on my hard drive and accessible.

If you’re using a Plesk server for email, see this fix.